Bridging the Storage Gap

As Snap Appliances Inc. officials see it, there is a battle among giants such as EMC Corp. and Network Appliance Inc. for market share in the data storage industry, and they want no part of it

STORAGE
As Snap Appliances Inc. officials see it, there is a battle among giants such as EMC Corp. and Network Appliance Inc. for market share in the data storage industry, and they want no part of it.

Instead, theyre hoping the San Jose, Calif., company can grab a chunk of the market that the bigger players are largely ignoring.

Last month, the company introduced the Snap Server ES12, aimed at midsize businesses and workgroups with more than 250 users and offering almost a terabyte of raw capacity at a price expected to be less than $25,000. The server, which the company said will go into beta testing this month and will be available generally in July, features up to 12 hot-swappable hard drives with 900GB of raw capacity (750 usable GB when formatted for RAID 5).
Snap officials said the server will bridge the gap between its less expensive, smaller productswhich cost about $4,500and the lowest end of Network Appliances product line, which goes for about $25,000.